This won't make staying at home — or moving — any more pleasant

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Verizon is scheduling in-house service calls and installations for November at the earliest. Even if the house you’re moving into already has cable. This article is from the NY Post, so I don’t know whether Verizon is employing the same no-go policy in Greenwich, but sucks either way.

In the meantime, don’t toss your modem at anyone.

As God is my witness, I thought whales couldn't fly

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British town uses Oregon’s exploding what fiasco to teach lesson on social distancing.

Fifty years ago, a huge sperm whale washed up on a Florence, Oregon beach. Deciding that it was too big to move, town officials decided to dynamite it. How much dynamite? Well, you can never have too much dynamite, so they thought twenty cases should do the trick. A military veteran advised against using so much but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound.

KATU-TV reporter Paul Linnman covered the effort, which attracted a large crowd of spectators. Officials moved the onlookers back about a quarter mile for safety and set off the dynamite.

“The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds,” Linnman says in his televised report.

The onlookers were covered in a downpour of whale blubber. Pieces soared and a large chunk crushed the roof of a car, though no one was hurt.

Not only was everyone covered in blubber, but the whale largely remained intact. Scavengers wouldn't touch the carcass. Officials spent the rest of the day burying it on the beach.

“The problem hadn’t gone away, only now there were thousands of bits of problem spread for miles around,” the council said, alluding to how the coronavirus could spread if social distancing wasn't practiced.

The council’s final point was that everyone should stay home and “let nature take its course.”

“Sometimes, it’s better to just sit at home and do nothing than go outside and do something ridiculous.”.

This would be aggressive pricing even in better times, I think

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Ho hum

Ho hum

Realtor tip of the day: if you don’t bring gas to a 2nd story master bedroom fireplace, no one is ever going to bring logs to it, either

Realtor tip of the day: if you don’t bring gas to a 2nd story master bedroom fireplace, no one is ever going to bring logs to it, either

397 Riversville Road, 5 acres up near the Boy Scout’s Seton Reservation, is new today at $6,650,400 (that last $400 is probably negotiable). This area hasn’t seen strong sales in at least the past dozen years — witness that $3.2 sale on N. Porchuck two months ago — and there’s not much here that makes me think this one will be different.

But it’s also listed for rent at $16,000, and that might be a story with a happier ending.

The Pandemic rental market continues apace

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Hope Farm

Hope Farm

20 Hope Farm, offered as an August rental at $25,000, has instead rented for $25,000 per month for the period April 1-July 31st. It’s been available for sale, now $3.250, since September 2018, when it began at $3.650. Take what you can get, I suppose.

364 Cedar Hill

364 Cedar Hill

Another long term resident of our residential sale rolls (beginning at $5.150 in April 2017, now asking $3.875) 364 Cedar Hill Road (off N. Maple), was also listed for rent at $17,500 back in June ‘19, but neither a buyer nor renter showed up. This time, on March 23rd it was priced at $30,000, and rented immediately.

Well wipe my ass and call me Sally

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Can we ever put this shortage behind us?

Can we ever put this shortage behind us?

Interesting article here on the great toilet paper shortage. Its author suggests that it’s not the result of hoarding so much as how our production and system works, and the shortage holds lessons for other products too. “And there isn’t an easy fix”.

Story after story explains the toilet paper outages as a sort of fluke of consumer irrationality. Unlike hand sanitizer, N95 masks, or hospital ventilators, they note, toilet paper serves no special function in a pandemic. Toilet paper manufacturers are cranking out the same supply as always. And it’s not like people are using the bathroom more often, right?

U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar summed up the paradox in a March 13 New York Times story: “Toilet paper is not an effective way to prevent getting the coronavirus, but they’re selling out.” The president of a paper manufacturer offered the consensus explanation: “You are not using more of it. You are just filling up your closet with it.”

…..

There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.

In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.

Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.

If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused.

So why can’t we just send that toilet paper to Safeway or CVS? That’s where supply chains and distribution channels come in.

Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills.

Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12.

“Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills,” added Jim Luke, a professor of economics at Lansing Community College, who once worked as head of planning for a wholesale paper distributor. “So for instance, Procter & Gamble [which owns Charmin] is huge in the retail consumer market. But it doesn’t play in the institutional market at all.”

Georgia-Pacific, which sells to both markets, told me its commercial products also use more recycled fiber, while the retail sheets for its consumer brands Angel Soft and Quilted Northern are typically 100% virgin fiber. Eric Abercrombie, a spokesman for the company, said it has seen demand rise on the retail side, while it expects a decline in the “away-from-home activity” [nice euphamism-Ed] that drives its business-to-business sales.

In theory, some of the mills that make commercial toilet paper could try to redirect some of that supply to the consumer market. People desperate for toilet paper probably wouldn’t turn up their noses at it. But the industry can’t just flip a switch. Shifting to retail channels would require new relationships and contracts between suppliers, distributors, and stores; different formats for packaging and shipping; new trucking routes — all for a bulky product with lean profit margins.

Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.

“The normal distribution system is like a well-orchestrated ballet,” said Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School. “If you make a delivery to a Walmart distribution center, they give you a half-hour window, and your truck has to show up then.” The changes wrought by the coronavirus, he said, “have thrown the whole thing out of balance, and everything has to readjust.”

While toilet paper is an extreme case, similar dynamics are likely to temporarily disrupt supplies of other goods, too — even if no one’s hoarding or panic-buying. The CEO of a fruit and vegetable supplier told NPR’s Weekend Edition that schools and restaurants are canceling their banana orders, while grocery stores are selling out and want more. The problem is that the bananas he sells to schools and restaurants are “petite” and sold loose in boxes of 150, whereas grocery store bananas are larger and sold in bunches. Beer companies face a similar challenge converting commercial keg sales to retail cans and bottles.

It’s all happening, of course, against the backdrop of a pandemic that makes it hard enough for these producers to keep up business as usual, let alone remold their operations to keep up with radical shifts in demand.

If there’s any good news, it’s that we can stop blaming these shortages on the alleged idiocy of our fellow consumers. “I’m absolutely convinced that very little was triggered by hoarding,” Luke said. Even a modest, reasonable amount of stocking up by millions of people in preparation for stay-at-home orders would have been enough to deplete many store shelves. From there, the ripple effects of availability concerns, coupled with a genuine increase in demand due to people staying in, are sufficient to explain the ongoing supply problems.

In the long run, the industry is still optimistic that it can adapt. “We’ve got fiber supply, we’ve got trees,” said Georgia-Pacific’s Abercrombie. “It’s just a matter of making the product and getting it out.”

i’m not entirely convinced here; how to explain the depletion of retail ammunition stock, except hoarding? But the author does provide insight into at least a part of the current shortages, and I found that interesting here, one morning in Maine. You disagree? You can just kiss my ass. Off to brew more coffee which, so far, there’s still plenty of.